


Howl

by whosAlana (EyeofOrion)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, Werewolf AU, anyway. pretentious af symbolism fic that doesn't go anywhere for a change, i don't have to tell you how i'm feeling right now. you know., i wrote this before i saw the finale but, i'm posting this right after i just finished watching the s3 finale for the first time, it's halloween themed just embrace it, it's not as if that describes pretty much everything i post on here, or maybe just obvious considering the tangent they were on, there are elements that are strangely similar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-10-29
Packaged: 2018-04-28 17:30:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5099231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EyeofOrion/pseuds/whosAlana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no Great Red Dragon, so Will does not return to see Hannibal in the Baltimore State Hospital in season 3. Also, Will’s a werewolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Howl

There was a lot of blood. When was there not?

He had not made it home last night. That meant it was getting worse. It had never been so bad, and that should worry him. It should worry him more than it did, really.

After seeing in three colours all of the grey-black night, the morning and the human spectrum felt deliriously colourful, as if he’d woken up in the wrong world. Perhaps he had. The trees were green and brown and grey, only a little yellow and no blue at all. The sky was blue though, unsettlingly so.

The blood on him was red-brown, rusty, crusty. Unpleasant. The difference between the hot-gold burn of whisky at night and the regretful tang in the morning. Last night it had looked right, felt right. Thick black blood in the cool light of a huge silvery moon hanging behind silhouetted trees was how the story went; encrusted orange-brown mess in the sweet-aired morning was all wrong. The sun had come up and it was too late to be covered in blood. Under night’s sweet dark cloak it was right, expected even, but in the daylight it was unforgivable. He should have made it home.

Tangled lashes feathered the very edges of his vision and he swept matted fu—hair out of his face as he pushed himself up above the level of the undergrowth. He would be able to find most of his clothes, but later a sweep might be necessary. Animal attacks didn’t usually incur human suspects, but he didn’t want his DNA on bloodstained clothes in the woods. Once he could probably get away with, if he thought far enough ahead to paint himself the victim; any more and there would be a pattern. He could not risk a pattern.

His trousers were intact, and hardly stained at all. His shirt not so much, but he knew by now not to wear anything he wanted to keep when he went to the woods. Not to keep anything he wanted.

On two unstable legs with pale soft feet, he followed the trail of breadcrumb bones to the edge of the trees, tongue exploring strange square teeth. The clicks and cracks under his feet – twig, twig, rib, twig – were muted by weak round ears. Careful fingers brushed underbrush from long, soft curls, tugged at hairs clung together with dull red stickiness.

His shoes were where he’d left them, under his car. In the trunk there were three two-litre bottles of water, a towel, and a pile of neatly folded clothes. This was not Will’s first rodeo.

 

He had not killed anything large for a while, and what he had killed he had not eaten. These days, his kills were largely rodents that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught the force of sharp claws. He did not eat rodents.

Truth be told, he was not sure what he _did_ eat. Once upon a time it might have been simple: the man eats beasts; the beast eats weaker animals, and sometimes, if he can get it, man. But the balance was upset. The man had eaten man, and now the beast did not know what it should eat.

The beast saw prey and it was not enough, not good enough. Warm blood was enticing, but it was locked away inside tough gristle and fur and filth and he did not want it. The beast’s eyes glinted with something that was not wild, and he thought – _thought_ – why should I eat something no better than roadkill? I am better.

I am _better_.

And what use was a wolf with a refined palette? _What_ was that wolf?

That wolf was hungry.

 

Three months passed, and three months in a row Will spent a night in the forest and his pack at home paced the floor, miles away, indoors. Three months in a row he woke between the trees with blood under his nails and in his teeth, but he had not eaten. The wolf’s belly was empty and the man woke feeling wrong.

Another half-month passed before he saw the news: a blood moon was rising, a full, red moon the like of which had not been seen for thirty years, to summon the chill of autumn.

At his feet, Winston bristled and let out a sound to which he could not respond with this throat, these lips.

Will’s belly rumbled. He put down the newspaper, burying the too-familiar thought that since he had stopped eating Dr Lecter’s food, neither the wolf nor the man had really felt full.

A week passed, and the time dribbled too slowly, as if it were too viscous and half-dried to drip by with any regularity. Another week crawled on and the moon hung above, waiting for him as he waited for it.

He was already in his way to the woods when the news broke that Dr Lecter was free. Will’s phone buzzed on the counter as his car left the safety of the house where he could not reach it. His pack yipped and nuzzled the crack below the door, and Jack’s frantic messages meant nothing to canine ears.

Will barely made it to the woods in time – this month the moon was eager and the white light hit him squarely between the eyes. Fingers scrabbled for the handle and he half-toppled from the car onto his side. In moments he had no fingers at all, only nimble claw-tipped pads. Skin shifted too quickly, opening half-fresh scars and tearing seams. Colours and angles bewildered him as his vision bent, rising scarlet becoming deepening blue. The moon had no patience for him tonight – there was no place for him but deep in the trees under the red moon.

He ran, and four legs became him. Air huffed in _out_ in _out_ and the thuds and cracks added another dimension to the rich tapestry of scent that had been unveiled. The sap was hardening and the leaves were just beginning to soften on the forest’s fertile floor and the birds were flitting fearful and the stag –

_New scent._

There were no stags in this part of the forest. But this nose did not make mistakes. The wolf stopped and drew a long, deep breath into his heaving chest. The smells were shifting Van Gogh brushstrokes around his sleek silver head and the image formed more clear and crisp than any eye could paint. There was a stag in this part of the forest. Just one.

Suddenly the wolf was strangely calm. The hunger in his belly was an old acquaintance – a friend, it was so familiar in its ubiquity, its torturous veracity. Now the hunger did not distract him; now there was nothing in the trees or beyond them that could distract him from the hunger. The hunger led the wolf on and on through the dark.

The stag stood tall and regal, as a stag should. There was no trace of scarring on his neck or tattered velvet about his antlers. This stag did not bear the marks of his inferiors for long, and he had long outgrown his velvet sheath. His antlers were pristine, symmetrical, intricate, smooth as tears – one might swear that they were not deciduous, but as stabile and incorruptible as the crag on which his great glassy hooves cast long still shadows. His sleek ink-dark fur clung so closely to his skin that his face, unbroken but for one sharp scar splitting his right cheek, was scarcely more than a silhouette of his stately skull, and yet he was not starving. This was no prey.

The wolf approached the crowned spectre as if approaching an altar.

There are only so many who see altars close. There are those who are to be bound together in holy witness. And there are the worshippers, and the sacrifices.

There would be blood spilled. When was there not? But the hunter was not sure whose blood it should be. He was so hungry, so hungry. His lips burned with the urge to draw them back into a snarl and sink his milk-white fangs into dark fur, dark flesh. Dark blood, sweeter and redder than the wine of all the berries in the forest. In the dark of the red moon he would look for all the world as if he had drunk ink. Of all the blood in all the world, the wolf no longer wanted any of it but his.

But he did not snarl, and he did not draw himself back or try to pounce. The wolf and the stag remained motionless under the waiting sky and looked each other in the eye.

Some civilisations believe that there are some nights when the veils between worlds, the boundaries between what is and what could be, are not so stubbornly anchored. There are some who would not be surprised if, on one night ruled by the moon and the blood, there was no certainty about who was hunter and who was prey – if, on such a singular night, there was only flesh, and blood.

 

It was Jack who found them, the two cold animals deep in the woods. In the warm light of day, they did not look as they had done to blue-yellow eyes under a hot red moon, but perhaps there were only two sets of eyes that could ever have seen them how they should have looked. An eerie silence surrounded the two of them as the animals gave them a wide berth, wisely. The silence extended beyond the boundary of the trees, beyond the car with the keys still in the ignition and the battery worn lifeless in the night, beyond the little safe house bobbing on a sea of lifting fog. There would be no more attacks, no more blood on the trees and in footprints that seemed to change shape if you followed them. The big bad wolf – whoever he was or had been – was no longer waiting in the dark.

There was a lot of blood. When was there not? But it was blood not taken forcibly, not ripped unceremoniously from veins that still held feebly onto it. 

Dripping crimson from the tips of the black antlers and of the white teeth, leaking sweetly from the smile-shaped incision in the wolf’s right side, the half-crown slicing his head above the right eye, and the scalpel-sharp slit in the stag’s lean neck, it was a gift, rare and lovely as a confession kissed into the beating hollow of a lover’s throat. This I give to you.

There must be blood spilled. When is there not? And I give it freely. Drink of me. This of mine is yours, and you will never be hungry again.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from [“Howl” – Florence and the Machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtXc9h2nki8) (I’d never properly listened to the song before I wrote this but I might as well have written it for the song)


End file.
